The PlayFinder™

The place is the front hall of a very chic Manhattan apartment, where the hostess, Winnie, is giving a party for one of her pet charities—in this case, Liars Anonymous. A late arrival, who is intercepted by the worldly wise maid, Martha, is one Danna—who claims to be both on the wagon and a very dear friend of Winnie. She is also, as it develops, rather close to Winnie's husband, Lon, as well (they claim to have shared a wild night of passion involving the bizarre use of vegeta... Read more

The scene is a small mission church in a remote part of New Mexico, where a middle-aged college professor and his lovely young wife detour unexpectedly after the highway is closed because of a possible "accident" at a nearby nuclear facility. They are soon joined by Father Doherty, the benevolent but canny parish priest; a brilliant young Navajo doctor, Don Tabaha, who is about to leave his people (despite Father Doherty's opposition) to accept a prestigious research fellowship... Read more

The setting is an all-night coffee shop on New York's upper Broadway, where the riff-raff, the bums, the petty thieves, the lost, the desperate of the big city come together. The movement of the kaleidoscopic in effect, a surging mosaic of overlapping and interrelating speeches and action as separate goals and characters are blended together around a common center. At the core of the play are Joe and Darlene, two young people who would seem to have the strength and the need to ... Read more

The setting is a large tent, where two flower show exhibitors have sought refuge from a sudden rainfall. She (Ms. Joslyn) is visibly annoyed at the curt treatment that the judges have given her "Little Soldier" and makes no bones about it. He (Mr. Wasserman) is equally dismayed by the fate of his "Little Tanya," but is too soft-spoken and retiring to vent his anger. They both agree that if the judges are getting soaked it serves them right, but Mr. Wasserman's attempts at frien... Read more

When murder roars through a small Missouri town, Ruth Hoch begins her own quest to find truth and honesty amid small town jealousies, religion, greed and lies. This tornado of a play propels you through its events like a page-turning mystery.... Read more

Deals with the encounter between a cynical, sophisticated New York antiques dealer and the taciturn young man, her nephew and house guest, who has come to the city to study theology. As reticent and unemotional as his aunt is loquacious and brittle, the young man contends that he has undergone a mystical experience—a revelation which is as unsettling to his aunt as it is fulfilling to him. As though intimidated by his inscrutable reserve, she grows increasingly voluble, reveali... Read more

The place is a Manhattan loft shared by Anna, a lithe young dancer-choreographer, and her two gay roommates—her collaborator, Robbie, who has just been killed in a freak boating accident, and Larry, a world-weary, caustically funny young advertising executive. As the play begins Anna is recovering from attending Robbie's funeral, comforted by her wealthy, well-meaning boyfriend, Burton, a sci-fi screenwriter whose persistent proposals of marriage Anna finds herself unable to ac... Read more

The opening play is Mr. Pintauro's Dawn: Quentin and his sister Veronica, together with his wife Pat, gather at the beach to scatter their mother's ashes. The act itself is a closure of sorts, but it stirs up conflicts between the three as marital wounds and sibling rivalries never dealt with are finally confronted.

Mr. Wilson's ... Read more

Mr. Wilson's DAY takes a playful look at Ace, a local gardener who goes to the beach on his lunch hour and runs into Macy, a sexpot yuppie (complete with a chic beach umbrella and laptop computer). Macy seduces Ace into applying her tanning lotion, but then the gardener's nutty girlfriend arrives to give them all a run for their money.... Read more

The monologue DAYS AHEAD portrays the fraught psyche of a fastidious little man as he confronts the memory of an early love which he perceives as a dusty, crumbling wall through which he must dig.... Read more

A haunting play of memory, written in a stream-of-consciousness contrapuntal style, which evokes the panorama of a young man's life—birth, army service, marriage, job, parenthood, old age—within the brief span of its action. Highly innovative in its theatricality, the play illuminates not only the continuity of human life, but also the poignancy and bitterness that can infuse it.... Read more

The scene is a sprawling farmhouse in rural Missouri, which is home to Ken, a legless Vietnam veteran, and his lover, Jed, a horticulturist. They are visited by Ken's sister, June, and her teenage daughter, and by Gwen and John—the former a hard-drinking, pill-popping heiress who aspires to be a rock star, the latter her wary-eyed husband and manager. All are old friends from college days, and former activists who agitated for what they hoped would be a better world. The action... Read more

In 1881 Ibsen rocked the literary and theatrical worlds with the publication of GHOSTS, a play so controversial in its time that even the head of Nya Teatern, one of Stockholm's major theatres, called it "one of the filthiest things ever written in Scandanavia." Once the uproar had died down, audiences proved far more receptive to GHOSTS than the literati had initially been, and while its dramatic subjects of promiscuity, incest and sexually transmitted disease no longer arouse... Read more

Gloria and Vincent, a once happily married couple, are suffering through the first days of their separation. Vincent has decided to move out, and as they divide their possessions amidst the mutual recriminations and accusations, their tolerance level for each other sinks. Vincent does indeed leave but returns early the next morning in a semi-drunken state. The household possessions that had proven to be so symbolic in defining their relationship are no longer there, for they ar... Read more

This fascinating and brilliantly inventive play details the chance meeting, after many years, of two girlhood friends. One has "married well" and the other has achieved a successful career, but, for both, as their poignant and telling conversation reveals, there is an aching emptiness beneath the elegant veneer of their lives.... Read more

Lawrence and Joanna, a brother and sister in their mid-twenties, have cut themselves off from the world "outside," living in a cluttered playroom which they share with two imaginary companions, "Edna" and "Claypone." Surrounded by toys, including a brightly colored miniature Ferris wheel, they have created an atmosphere of almost suffocating intimacy and remove, where play becomes the business of life and reality an alien force to be kept at bay. But life intrudes all the same,... Read more

The scene is the lobby of a rundown hotel so seedy that it has lost the "e" from its marquee. As the action unfolds, the residents, ranging from young to old, from the defiant to the resigned, meet and talk and interact with each other during the course of one day. The drama is of passing events in their lives, of everyday encounters and of the human comedy, with conversations often overlapping into a contrapuntal musical flow. In the resulting mosaic each character emerges cle... Read more

This explosively funny and ingenious farce deals with what might have been a seduction—but while she is all for it (despite her feeble protests) he has eyes only for her telephone. And what he can't say to her face, floods out readily on the phone, with hilarious and devastating results.... Read more

At seventeen, Alan visits the California home of his father and his father's former mistress turned wife. His father's life now centers around his two young sons, a tiresome job at an aircraft plant, and two teenage girls who are boarded with the family by the state. Alan has come expecting to go to school full time and work part time at the plant, having accepted his father's encouragement to do so. But the older man is incapable of honesty, least of all emotional honesty, and... Read more

In words of the Village Voice, this: "…is a bedtime story about two roommates: Rachel and Agnes. Rachel is glamorous, fast-living, sometimes lost in her own self-dramatizations. Agnes is plain, matter-of-fact, her shyness masked by a quirky personality. Rachel has turned her latest boyfriend in to the police when he stole from her, and now she is remorseful, deciding she is in love with him. Agnes tries to cheer her up with wisecracks and prods her to rekindle her self-awarenes... Read more

THE MADNESS OF LADY BRIGHT traces the mental breakdown of Lesley Bright, an aging homosexual whose past returns to haunt him with the emptiness of the choices he made.... Read more

Having come home to visit her mother, who has been placed in a nursing home, Diane, now a well-known writer, is being interviewed for the local newspaper. Only she speaks. Her remarks are in answer to such questions as where she gets the ideas for her stories; whether her youth in Mountain Grove influenced her work; and why she decided to leave home. At first obliging and matter-of-fact, Diane gradually begins to reveal more than her questioner might have bargained for—a childh... Read more

At an archeological dig in the Midwest, a party of university scientists are unearthing vestiges of a lost Indian civilization. Heading the group is Dr. Howe, accompanied by his wife and daughter, and by a younger associate and his wife. They are all joined by Dr. Howe's sister, a famous and jaded novelist, who is "drying out" after many years of dissipation in remote parts of the world. There is also an outsider, the acquisitive son of a local landowner, who wants the digging ... Read more

The place is a Manhattan police station, where a young man, Tom, is being interrogated after having created a disturbance at the hospital where his friend and lover has just died from AIDS. Although only Tom speaks, it is clear that the flood of memories that bursts forth is triggered by the uncomprehending questions of the policemen who now watch him in stony silence. At first he is defensive and impatient with his questioners' inability to understand his behavior, but gradual... Read more

In a ramshackle cantina in Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the night of July 15, 1945, four people await the test of the atomic bomb. Each of them is connected directly or indirectly with the top-secret Trinity project, and over the course of the evening the horror of what is about to be unleashed on the world begins to dawn on them. As tensions mount, and questions of science, religion and morality collide, RAIN DANCE makes palpable the thrilling and terrifying journey of our first... Read more

Geri, a seventeen-year-old, Vietnamese-American, has taken time out from a rigorous touring schedule as a piano prodigy to stay on her Aunt Geneva's Redwood plantation in Northern California. She's been coming here for years, but recently she's become obsessed with approaching the homeless Vietnam veterans who retreated to the forests because they couldn't cope with society after returning from the war. One such vet-eran she interviews in the forest, Lyman, she detains against ... Read more

As Martin Gottfried comments, "It is a simple one. A mystery, really. A man has been murdered. The mystery is, who he is, who murdered him and what were the circumstances? And to solve it, Wilson looks at the outsides and insides of his tiny, Middle Western town. He looks at a middle-aging woman who falls in love with the young man who comes to work in her cafe. He looks at a coarse, nasty woman mistreating her senile mother, who is obsessed with visions of Eldritch being evil ... Read more

This play is a vivid and affecting study of the sometimes disturbing, sometimes funny crises that lie between youth and adulthood. The scene is a ramshackle beach house on the California coast, where Irene, a widow and poet and college teacher, is summering with her children and the friends who make their place a second home. Owen, her older son, and Joan, her daughter, are college students—old enough to feel the need to strike out on their own and yet still young enough to be ... Read more

SAY DE KOONING pits an artist and two female lovers against the very strains of modern life they hoped to escape by summering at the beach. Not even there, though, can they avoid the pitfalls of their own demanding personalities.... Read more

Schuyler Browne and his friends, Josh, Ann and Mary, gather for the spring at Schuyler's family's Hampton home. Schuyler, a trust-fund kid from wealthy lineage, doesn't yet know what to do with his life. Josh, very into computers, is on the verge of making millions on a stock market deal done over the Internet. Ann, a would-be dancer, is turned down for a grant and is fearful of becoming a blue collar worker. Mary is a business manager about to open her own company, and the one... Read more

Two young suburban couples, friends of long standing, are suddenly aware of strains and pressures that have inexorably come into their lives. Adultery is one of these—a fact for one of the wives, an imminent possibility for one of the husbands—but ambitions, frustrated and potential, and a crying out for more meaningful personal involvement within their marriages are others. As they come together to examine their plight and to probe the genesis of their unhappiness the play mov... Read more

SEXTET (YES): Written in a striking contrapuntal form, this imaginative and haunting short play is compromised of the thoughts and recollections of six characters, who sit at random, answering each other's revelations with a quiet "yes." Out of the pattern of their memories, the interweaving of their destinies, emerges a sense of their frailty, and humanity, and the disquieting vulnerability of life itself.... Read more

This brief play was initially presented as part of a special program on pollution and conservation entitled Foul!

Both touching and disturbing, it centers on three aging ladies sitting on the stoop of a run-down city brownstone, commenting quietly on the inexorable disintegration of the quality, and possibility, of life. Their mood is resigned—but terrifying as well—as they accept the ebbing away of freshness and beauty and the element of hopefulness that was on... Read more

Liz Barnard is an anthropologist studying West Coast gangs for behavior similar to African tribes. Her son, Don, is a homosexual Episcopal minister whose parishioners are poor and many sick with AIDS. Liz's daughter, Barbara, is a gifted sculptress whose current breakthrough show launches a stellar career. Barbara lives with Ian, a brilliant young astronomer and popular university professor who, along with his colorful colleague Mickey, stumbles upon a spectacular discovery at ... Read more

The time is Independence Day, 1944, the place the parlor of the Talley homestead in Lebanon, Missouri. As World War II rages across the seas, the Talleys are beset with crises of a different sort. Slipping into senility, the elder Mr. Talley still has flashes of explosive lucidity, when he schemes to dispose of the local bank among heirs of his own choice, and berates his charming but spineless son, Eldon, for considering the sale of the family garment business to an eastern co... Read more

Winner of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
THE STORY: The scene is the ornate, deserted Victorian boathouse on the Talley place in Lebanon, Missouri; the time 1944. Matt Friedman, an accountant from St. Louis, has arrived to plead his love to Sally Talley, the susceptible but uncertain daughter of the family. Bookish, erudite, totally honest, and delightfully funny, Matt refuses to accept Sally's rebuffs and her fears that her family would never approve of their marriage. Charming ... Read more

THIS IS THE RILL SPEAKING, A Play for Voices, is a poetic, mosaic-style evocation of small-town life told through multiple voices which shift and blend from identity to identity.... Read more

A subtle and revealing study of life in provincial Russia, the story of the play is familiar to all. What distinguishes this new version is the translator's unique responsiveness to Chekov's intentions and the care with which these intentions are realized. To prepare himself for his task, Mr. Wilson studied Russian and went back to the original text of the play. The result is a rare fidelity and sensitivity to Chekov's art for, in the words of Mel Gussow, "As translated by Mr. ... Read more

The scene is the trailer where Ruby, a woman of indeterminate age and compliant disposition, lives amid an overgrown garden of "thymus vulgaris," an herb which smells suspiciously like menthol chest rub. She is joined unexpectedly by her daughter, Evelyn, a warmhearted hooker who announces that she is the intended of Solly, the "Grapefruit King," although right now she is not so sure that she wants to go through with it or, for that matter, that Solly does either. But the lure ... Read more

A high-style spoof on comedy in the Oscar Wilde mode, which keeps a delightfully straight face while poking fun at the stilted behavior of its very proper characters. The scene is the sitting room of Mrs. Dandywine's elegant summer "cottage," where things take a flustered turn at the unexpected arrival of a man who, of course, must be up to no good.... Read more

This brilliantly inventive short play covers the span of a man's life in a matter of minutes. Striking harmonics of uncanny depth and pertinence through its rapid fire dialogue, the play not only constructs the outline of a human existence but also catches and illuminates the essentials of all that is or can be.... Read more